Lionel Trilling?
Lionel Train?
Roger Ebert: Killing with Bore-dum
The other point that I would make is that while we have seen a decline in the consumption of "great literature", we have also seen an incredible uptick in the consumption of non-fiction books. He's not accounting for that, perhaps intentionally.
Still, Twilight and Harry Potter are to reading what Taco Bell is to eating. It may be plentifully sold, but that doesn't mean it's not crap.
He lost me at “disports.”
Actually he lost me with his assumption that everyone had read Ginsburg’s “Howl.” I tried. Ick. No thanks.
I think government schools do a wretched job of teaching a love of books. Do the kids read the book for class? Or does the teacher show the movie? And what kind of variety is demonstrated? Doesn't everyone read "To Kill a Mockingbird"? "Catcher in the Rye"? Wouldn't it be great if you ran into someone at camp who had never heard of those books? You could introduce them! And what if your new friend was shocked that you hadn't heard of "My Antonia"? They could open a new world for you! But nooooo ... often the conversation is (at best) "Did you read 'To Kill a Mockingbord'?" "Naaaaaaah. I was supposed to. I just watched the movie instead." "Yeah, me too."
If kids learned Latin, if kids memorized real poetry (and, No, Alice Walker isn't a real poet) then they might learn to love language.
For most kids, literature is what you find on Facebook, and culture is what you find on Youtube.
People should read what they enjoy, not what the pointy-head academics consider necessary to become “well-read”.
Not if I have to go to Ebert’s web page first.
Indeed.
Extraordinary syntax from an extraordinary writer.
His work will survive the ages.
Do I have to read Alice Adams, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Lillian Hellman? No thanks, I’d rather read Witold Gombrowicz and Alvaro Mutis.
I read for my pleasure, not to impress other people. Some of what I read winds up on the literati’s list of what people “should” read, most of it doesn’t, I don’t care one way or the other. Most folks who throw around quotes are just douches trying to impress people, I learned long ago that anybody that feels an internal need to impress the people around them isn’t impressive, so as soon as somebody throws a literati quote out I know to ignore them.
;-)
I'm reminded of Twain's quote on classic books:
I don't believe any of you have ever read PARADISE LOST, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic -- something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
When asked to describe which books I have read; my response is;
“Why read when I can write”.
I dropped off somewhere on the way down the article, around "My first exposure to Henry James was the short story 'The Real Thing' ..." which made me think Roger was quite full of himself.
After that it's just too much information about someone I try to remain blissfully unaware of:
Having read Great Expectations under some duress in high school, I went through seven years of college without ever encountering Dickens again. It was in about 1980 that I signed up for the Folio edition of Dickens, picked up Nicholas Nickleby, and was hooked. No one is more compulsively readable. But I had to come to that myself. Oddly, I started sooner on Trollope. "He is such a consolation," Curley told me one day in a London pub. "During the London Blitz, Trollope enjoyed an enormous popularity." Where should I start? I asked. "Oh, with the Barsetshire novels, I should say."
Blah, blah, blah, to the point of self-parody. I'd say "Die already, you pretentious name-dropper!" but given Roger's health problems that could be considered cruel.
Sure, if people still do read, their interest in writers drops off drastically when the writers die and aren't producing any longer. A few writers are picked up again and added to the canon, but no one is as dead as most recently dead writers.
Ebert's wrong though. Critics like Trilling, Wilson, and even Fiedler and Kazin are still read -- if only because people who are expected to know about dead poets and novelists can avoid reading them by looking up what dead critics have said about them. If you have to appear well read, you can get away without reading Mailer or Farrell or Elkin or whoever, if you can dig up what reviewers wrote about them in their own time.
If there is an afterlife it must be very painful to the shade of Alfred Kazin to go from being so talked about to being so obscure, but I'm not aware that Trilling has been forgotten yet. Even Edmund Wilson gets reviewed when new biographies and collections of his work come out. The periodicals he wrote for The New Yorker and The New Republic have an interest in keeping Wilson's name from falling into complete oblivion: they keep him (ever so slightly) alive, because he makes them look good.
He laughed, and laughed, and laughed. Then his mouth fell off.
Allan Bloom is the only one I have read of them (”The Closing of the American Mind”).
